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My experience has been that Discord is a pleasure to use. And then there’s IRC, Slack and Gitter - by preference. With Gitter being by far the worst

by dfee 7y ago

Eikon 7y ago
I never used gitter but started to consider it. May you please expand on why it’s not of your liking?
- fouc 7y ago
  The gitter frontend client is a bit glitchy with scrolling up the backlog. But other than that, it's certainly workable.
radicalbyte 7y ago
Same here, although it's still not a patch on IRC. The problem with IRC has always been that it's usually blocked everywhere and that there is really only one top-class client (mIRC). It's such a shame that for chat you have the choice between something which turns your laptop into a helicoper but works everywhere or something super fast and extendable (and free!) which is blocked by every firewall everywhere.
- lawfulcactus 7y ago
  I use a weechat relay over websockets (via nginx). It's a pretty convenient solution to the whole "my corporate firewall thinks I'm part of a botnet" issue (in addition to giving you channel history persistence).
- seisvelas 7y ago
  > mIRC Ha! Never thought I'd hear mIRC described as a top-class client. Unix has irssi, and I'd opine that even Xchat is better than mIRC. I hadn't though of mIRC in so long. It makes me think back to the days of planning imageboard raids on IRC. They even had a special version of mIRC for imageboard raids called m/i/rc.
StavrosK 7y ago
Zulip is at the top of my preference list, at least for professional usage. Give it a shot, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I love it.
- mnsc 7y ago
  I've pushed zulip in my org (~50 people, 15 devs) and no one that has tried has "gotten it". I haven't used it that much myself so I can't demo it properly but i believe it could be "the right way" of doing internal communication for teams/dm. But maybe it's too advanced? Do you know of any official/unofficial videos that would help getting traction?
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Yes, Zulip has the disadvantage that the UX isn't exactly the same as every other chat program, so it takes some getting used to. The UX is great, it's just different enough that people don't grok it immediately, and that's too much for people unless you start with a core that's using it and grow the company around that (hard to do with an already established company). I'm afraid I don't know of any videos, but I tell people "Zulip is exactly like Slack, but everything is a thread, and you can zoom in and out of threads" and find that that's basically enough for them to get it. Maybe try that with a few people and see?
    - rdrey 7y ago
      In our early days of Zulip-use, I had to regularly edit people's messages to force them into using a topic. A handful of people still don't get it and treat topics as special/long-lived channels, but most of us devs love it.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        You can break messages off into other topics, and we have one long-lived channel per stream, which I've found helps (you don't always want to make a new thread to post a one-off link).
  - 7y ago
muzani 7y ago
We regularly have arguments among our gaming groups about which one is better. I find that Discord starts to get messy around 20+ people, after which a community starts to fragment into more smaller discord servers. Slack has been pretty solid for large groups though. We'd normally hit the message limit in 3 days, sometimes even 1 day during a large raid. It didn't really matter because nobody really wants to scroll that far back. IRC seems to have a chance with IRCCloud and the like, but it's just hard to get people into. But we are starting to see channels with 500-1000 people again, so maybe this appeals to some communities.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Interesting that my anecdata seems the exact opposite: I've never enjoyed being in a Slack of more than a dozen or so people. Slack never seems to have quite the balance for notification management that I want, but I've been in several huge Discords and not felt overwhelmed and/or like I was missing important announcements or things relevant to my interests/needs. Also, writing bots to auto-manage one off tasks always feels like more of a chore with Slack whereas I've spun up some really hairy "get the job done immediately" bots, that just run on my local machine, for Discord, with very little ceremony beyond convincing a guild leader to install the bot.
blattimwind 7y ago
Discord is okay as an "all in one" package, but purely for voice communications falls far behind alternatives like Teamspeak.
- Ajef 7y ago
  Does Teamspeak allow each user to set the volume of any other user they hear separately? This has made discord the current choice for our group of friends.
  - lebaux 7y ago
    Yes.
    - DownGoat 7y ago
      Can even set 3D settings for each friend, which can be handy. For some of the cooler things you can do with Teamspeak through extensions see the Arma 3 ACRE plugin. http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=19324 http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=19324 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1q4NgyCMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1q4NgyCMs
  - falcolas 7y ago
    One of the biggest things that Teamspeak has over Discord is its ability to do compression and normalization on incoming audio streams. Between those two, it doesn't matter how poor or inconsistant a microphone setup the other party has, it sounds good. That's alone is my biggest wish out of Discord.
- errantspark 7y ago
  Define far behind? Discord solves the low latency communication problem for me like 99.99% of the time without any sort of issue. I don't really see how you're claiming it falls far behind if the difference between it and Teamspeak/Mumble/Vent or whatever is so razor thin. I've barely noticed any issues in the past 3 years of Discord, and it was the same with the previous 4 years of Mumble and however many years of Vent and Xfire before that.
pier25 7y ago
> Gitter being by far the worst God I hate Gitter. I'm forced to use it because some communities (such as Mithril.js) hang there but it's slow, riddled with UX problems, and search is completely useless.

My experience has been that Discord is a pleasure to use. And then there’s IRC, Slack and Gitter - by preference. With Gitter being by far the worst

by dfee 7y ago

My experience has been that Discord is a pleasure to use. And then there’s IRC, Slack and Gitter - by preference. With Gitter being by far the worst

Eikon 7y ago

I never used gitter but started to consider it. May you please expand on why it’s not of your liking?

fouc 7y ago
The gitter frontend client is a bit glitchy with scrolling up the backlog. But other than that, it's certainly workable.

radicalbyte 7y ago

Same here, although it's still not a patch on IRC. The problem with IRC has always been that it's usually blocked everywhere and that there is really only one top-class client (mIRC). It's such a shame that for chat you have the choice between something which turns your laptop into a helicoper but works everywhere or something super fast and extendable (and free!) which is blocked by every firewall everywhere.

lawfulcactus 7y ago
I use a weechat relay over websockets (via nginx). It's a pretty convenient solution to the whole "my corporate firewall thinks I'm part of a botnet" issue (in addition to giving you channel history persistence).
seisvelas 7y ago
> mIRC Ha! Never thought I'd hear mIRC described as a top-class client. Unix has irssi, and I'd opine that even Xchat is better than mIRC. I hadn't though of mIRC in so long. It makes me think back to the days of planning imageboard raids on IRC. They even had a special version of mIRC for imageboard raids called m/i/rc.

StavrosK 7y ago

Zulip is at the top of my preference list, at least for professional usage. Give it a shot, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I love it.

mnsc 7y ago
I've pushed zulip in my org (~50 people, 15 devs) and no one that has tried has "gotten it". I haven't used it that much myself so I can't demo it properly but i believe it could be "the right way" of doing internal communication for teams/dm. But maybe it's too advanced? Do you know of any official/unofficial videos that would help getting traction?
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Yes, Zulip has the disadvantage that the UX isn't exactly the same as every other chat program, so it takes some getting used to. The UX is great, it's just different enough that people don't grok it immediately, and that's too much for people unless you start with a core that's using it and grow the company around that (hard to do with an already established company). I'm afraid I don't know of any videos, but I tell people "Zulip is exactly like Slack, but everything is a thread, and you can zoom in and out of threads" and find that that's basically enough for them to get it. Maybe try that with a few people and see?
  - rdrey 7y ago
    In our early days of Zulip-use, I had to regularly edit people's messages to force them into using a topic. A handful of people still don't get it and treat topics as special/long-lived channels, but most of us devs love it.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      You can break messages off into other topics, and we have one long-lived channel per stream, which I've found helps (you don't always want to make a new thread to post a one-off link).
- 7y ago

muzani 7y ago

We regularly have arguments among our gaming groups about which one is better. I find that Discord starts to get messy around 20+ people, after which a community starts to fragment into more smaller discord servers. Slack has been pretty solid for large groups though. We'd normally hit the message limit in 3 days, sometimes even 1 day during a large raid. It didn't really matter because nobody really wants to scroll that far back. IRC seems to have a chance with IRCCloud and the like, but it's just hard to get people into. But we are starting to see channels with 500-1000 people again, so maybe this appeals to some communities.

WorldMaker 7y ago
Interesting that my anecdata seems the exact opposite: I've never enjoyed being in a Slack of more than a dozen or so people. Slack never seems to have quite the balance for notification management that I want, but I've been in several huge Discords and not felt overwhelmed and/or like I was missing important announcements or things relevant to my interests/needs. Also, writing bots to auto-manage one off tasks always feels like more of a chore with Slack whereas I've spun up some really hairy "get the job done immediately" bots, that just run on my local machine, for Discord, with very little ceremony beyond convincing a guild leader to install the bot.

blattimwind 7y ago

Discord is okay as an "all in one" package, but purely for voice communications falls far behind alternatives like Teamspeak.

Ajef 7y ago
Does Teamspeak allow each user to set the volume of any other user they hear separately? This has made discord the current choice for our group of friends.
- lebaux 7y ago
  Yes.
  - DownGoat 7y ago
    Can even set 3D settings for each friend, which can be handy. For some of the cooler things you can do with Teamspeak through extensions see the Arma 3 ACRE plugin. http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=19324 http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=19324 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1q4NgyCMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1q4NgyCMs
- falcolas 7y ago
  One of the biggest things that Teamspeak has over Discord is its ability to do compression and normalization on incoming audio streams. Between those two, it doesn't matter how poor or inconsistant a microphone setup the other party has, it sounds good. That's alone is my biggest wish out of Discord.
errantspark 7y ago
Define far behind? Discord solves the low latency communication problem for me like 99.99% of the time without any sort of issue. I don't really see how you're claiming it falls far behind if the difference between it and Teamspeak/Mumble/Vent or whatever is so razor thin. I've barely noticed any issues in the past 3 years of Discord, and it was the same with the previous 4 years of Mumble and however many years of Vent and Xfire before that.

pier25 7y ago

> Gitter being by far the worst God I hate Gitter. I'm forced to use it because some communities (such as Mithril.js) hang there but it's slow, riddled with UX problems, and search is completely useless.